HDTV Almanac

The U.S. Justice Department announced yesterday that the long arm of the law has reached out and grabbed another miscreant. The guilty party this time was a fourth executive from Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) — which has since merged with Innolux and TPO to become Chimei Innolux (CMI). The charge was price fixing in the LCD flat panel market, in violation of the U.S. Sherman Act.

The executive has entered a guilty plea, and the felony charge comes with more than just a slap on the wrist. He personally will pay a fine of $35,000 and will serve five years in jail. This brings the scorecard totals to 19 executives and eight companies found guilty of price fixing, with a total of $890 million assessed in criminal fines. Even for an industry as large as LCDs, this is not chicken feed.

Whether or not this will deter others from price fixing in this viciously competitive market segment remains to be seen, but this has to be viewed as a victory for law enforcement, for LCD television manufacturers, and for consumers as well.

ESPN 3D has announced that it will broadcast about 13 NCAA Division 1 football games this year. The network also has named the first three contests:

- Monday, September 6, 8 PM Eastern: Boise State vs. Virginia Tech
- Saturday, September 11, 3:40 PM Eastern: Ohio State vs. Miami
- Saturday, September 18, 7 PM Eastern: Clemson vs. Auburn

The network also will show the Tostitos BCS National Championship Game on Monday, January 10 at 8:30 PM Eastern. ESPN 3D also plans to broadcast additional live sports programming this year, including the NBA, college basketball, and Winter X Games 15. The network is still developing the skills needed for live 3D broadcasting, which requires different camera angles than standard 2D coverage in order to be most effective. The college football broadcasts are sponsored by Sony, and ESPN 3D will be using Sony equipment to produce their live coverage.

13 football games are probably not enough to warrant getting a new 3DTV for most people, but it may be the nudge that some early adopters will need to push them into making a move. Adding 3D coverage to an event that is already being produced in 2D increases the costs significantly – especially since it appears that you can’t use the same camera angles for both — so it will be a while before more networks will be able to provide a lot of live 3D programming. Still, ESPN is getting out in front and doing the experimenting and learning that will be necessary when 3D becomes commonplace, if not the standard mode.

In case you haven’t been following the story, Comcast wants NBC like a six year old girl wants a real live pony of her very own. Unfortunately, Comcast can’t just walk down to the paddock and plunk down billions of dollars and walk away with a major network. It seems that its competitors, Federal agencies such as the FCC, and Congress all have some strong opinions about the deal, and it’s not clear that it will win final approval.

That’s what makes yesterday’s agreement with CBS so significant. Comcast inked a 10-year deal that gives CBS a lot of money, and means that Comcast won’t have to worry about negotiating new deals all the time with CBS. We’ve seen the dust-ups over fees between networks and cable companies, and that situation is only likely to get worse.

But this also signals that Comcast can still play nice with other networks, even if it ends up owning NBC. This could have a positive impact on the FCC and legislators who could stand in the way of the NBC deal. Even so, it’s still too early for Comcast to break out the bubbly.

I received some interesting information from Peerless last week. This is one of the companies that makes top quality mounts for flat panel televisions. I was curious about how many people actually use mounts these days; the conventional wisdom from about five years ago was that fewer than 25% of all sets got mounted on the wall. Peerless has compiled numbers based on its customers, and has come up with an interesting trend.

For sets 19″ to 22″, they estimate 18% get mounted. For 23″ to 37″ — the sweet spot in terms of total unit sales — nearly one-third end up on mounts. For 40″ to 52″, the share jumps to 46% which is close to half. And for larger than 52″, a whopping 81% end up on the wall.

It is clear that more people are mounting their flat panels than did five years ago. Why is that? Well, you can see that larger sets are more likely to get hung on the wall, and a larger portion of the sets sold these days fall into this size range. Also, these larger sets take up a lot more space when left on their table top stands. In general, flat panel sets weigh much less for a given size than they did years ago, making it more practical to hang them.

And I think another factor is that mounts have become more available to consumers who want to do it themselves, without the help of an expensive professional installer. You can find a wide range of models available, from no-name Asian products to top designs like those from Peerless. And the designs are getting more practical as well. The mount pictured here (looking down from above) can swing out left or right to a full 90 degrees, yet retracts to just one inch from the wall.

So chances are good that your next HDTV will end up on a wall.

The market research firm DisplaySearch is now forecasting that about 3.4 million 3DTVs will be shipped in 20210, for about a 5% share of the total worldwide HDTV market. One of its competitors in the display market research business is iSupply, which now predicts that about 4.2 million 3DTVs will ship this year. DisplaySearch’s prediction for the year 2014 is 42.9 million, which is considerably more pessimistic than iSupply’s 60.5 million forecast.

Whichever number you choose, the big growth in this segment isn’t expected to start until 2012 at which point the premium for 3D capability will be reduced and there will be more content available to attract consumers.

The analysts at iSupply make an interesting point in their forecasts. They predict that the sales of NeTVs — HDTVs that can connect directly to a network to access the Internet — will significantly outsell 3DTVs over the same period. They predict 27.7 million worldwide units this year, growing to 148.3 million in 2014.

I suspect that they are probably right that the NeTVs will sell better. First, the technology has been out longer, and so the premium is getting smaller for the feature. 3D capability is still limited to the larger, premium models which do not sell in the same volumes as more affordable models. At the same time, the Internet connectivity is migrating down into smaller and less expensive models, so it makes good sense that they will sell more.

“Cutting the cord” is the term that analysts have given to the growing movement of consumers who have disconnected themselves from the traditional utilities. At first, it meant users who got rid of landline telephone service and rely instead solely on cell phones. Now it also applies to folks who are now watching so much television content from the Internet that they are turning off their expensive cable and satellite subscription television service.

But what does it mean for a broadcaster to “cut the cord”? In one case, it could mean severing the connection between the production facility and the broadcast transmitter. What’s that? How can you be a television station without transmitting?

Well, a new report entitled “A Future for Public Media in New Jersey” makes a radical solution for public television in New Jersey. Sandwiched between the giant Philadelphia and New York City markets, the New Jersey public television stations exist primarily to provide coverage of state news that does not always get in-depth coverage from stations in the adjacent states. The report suggests selling off the stations’ broadcast licenses (for a lot of money) and just relying on cable and satellite services to carry the programming. In cash-strapped New Jersey, this could create an endowment that could sustain the network for a long time without having to rely on state funds.

The idea is that a huge majority of the audience already subscribes to cable or satellite services already, and the broadcast systems are a reduntant and expensive luxury. One problem is that the local cable companies are not obligated to carry programming from stations that are not broadcast locally, so the New Jersey public television system would have to get some sort of assurance that their shows would be distributed. Still, it’s an intriguing concept, and raises questions about the future of terrestrial broadcasting of televsion program in general. If the content is available online or by subscription service, why bother taking up valuable broadcast spectrum?

I don’t expect terrestrial broadcast to end any time soon, this does open the way to some alternative futures.

At SID 2010 in Seattle, I saw a clever demonstration. Syndiant wanted to demonstrate how their pocket projector could be used to create a stereoscopic 3D image. So one of their engineers duct taped two of them together, put different polarizers across each lens, aligned the images, and voila! It was a very effective 3D projector that worked with passive glasses.

So that was a cool way to get 3D from a pocket projector. And then along came this:

This is a table top display that creates a 3D image that you can view without glasses. In theory, it can create an image that you can walk around. In this demonstration from NICT’s Keihanna Research Labs, it only can be viewed across a 120-degree range. In order to create the image, the display uses 96 individual pocket projector engines, each aimed at a specially-designed funnel-shaped device that creates an image that appears to float above the table.

Now consider this; a standard 3DTV simply has two images. One is for the left eye, and the other for the right. This table requires 96 separate images. Start showing a full motion image at 30 frames per second, and you’re talking about 2,880 images per second. If you expand this to the full 360-degree viewing range, it balloons to 8,640 images per second. At full HD resolution, that’s 18 billion pixels per second. Figure 24 bits of color per pixel, and you’re up to more than 140 gigabytes of data per second. So while this is a clever creation, we’ve got a ways to go before we can have a system that could support a full motion HD version of this concept.

The researchers envision a way to use this to simulate a sports field projected into a stadium so you could watch your home team play in 3D even when they are playing out of town. I’m not betting against the concept, but I don’t expect to see it any time soon. (You can read more about this in an article at DigInfo.tv.)

Yes, this is another supply chain story. Never heard of “metalorganic gases“? Don’t feel bad; few people outside of the semiconductor industry (and some Chemistry majors) know what they are. Apparently they are an essential component in the fabrication of certain types of semiconductors, and they are used to deposit thin films of different chemical compounds. And according to an article in DIGITIMES, the price for some of these has doubled recently.

Some companies have more efficient production than others, and thus less of these expensive resources are wasted. As a result, the cost of these materials is a smaller portion of their total cost for a finished product, and their costs won’t increase as much as for the less efficient companies.

Now, why should you care? Good question. Some of the semiconductors that are fabricated using metalorganic gases are LEDs. Demand is skyrocketing for LEDs, due to growth in their use as solid state lighting and as backlights for LCD panels. And the LED panels are used in just about every notebook computer, many desktop monitors, and a growing number of LCD HDTVs. If the cost of making LEDs goes up significantly, then the cost of these devices will also be impacted. According to the DIGITIMES report, those manufacturers who make the least expensive and low quality LEDs are likely to be hit the hardest. Fortunately, the LEDs used for most HDTVs are high quality devices, and may be affected less by the cost increase, but this could help slow the price decline of LCD HDTVs with LED backlights later this year.

Sure, anyone who works with computers is familar with Dell, the company that built an empire based on online shopping for desktops and notebooks. (They even managed to make us forget Gateway, with their spotted-cow shipping boxes, which is now part of Acer.) But would you think of Dell for your next HDTV?

You might consider it. Over this past weekend, Dell ran a one-day special deal on the Sharp LC-42SB48UT for $549 including free shipping. The price today is back up to $599, but this is still lower than the price charged by many other online retailers for this entry level 42″ LCD HDTV.

Clearly, Dell is making an effort to diversify into consumer electronics, as it carries a variety of digital cameras, MP3 players, and gaming consoles, in addition to a wide selection of televisions. They’re not just computers anymore.

Only a handful of early adopters got to see it, but Major League Baseball broadcast some experimental 3DTV early this month around the All-Star Game in Anaheim, California. Earlier in the week, Fox Sports shot two games in 3D from Seattle as the Mariners took on the Yankees. These were sponsored by Panasonic and DirecTV, and were broadcast by DirecTV, Verizon, and major cable operators.

The big game was the All-Star Game, however, which Fox Sports shot using 13 3D cameras, including some Panasonic camcorders. The stereoscopic images apparently enhanced the viewing experience for many viewers, giving a better sense of the distance from pitcher to batter, and making it easier to judge the ball’s position and movement.

While no additional games are scheduled to be televised in 3D for this season at this point, the experiments were deemed a success. The challenge will be to find a way to fund the significantly-greater expense of 3D coverage, especially if it has to be provided in parallel with the existing 2D high definition production. Fortunately, the installed base of 3DTVs won’t represent a significant portion of the viewing public in the U.S. for a couple of years, so the MLB and the networks still have time to work it out.